At the edge of dawn each day, Gary Gauger awoke to the
same nightmare: He was on death row for a crime he did not
commit.

"I'd open my eyes and see those prison bars and realize it
wasn't a dream," says Gauger, an organic vegetable farmer who
spent three years in Joliet's Stateville Correctional Center,
including eight months on death row, for the 1993 murder of his
parents on their Illinois farm.

Gauger, an unassuming man with gentle blue eyes and a long
beard, had one last chance: the dedication of a college professor and
a handful of students working at the Northwestern University
School of Law. For professor Lawrence Marshall (L85) and the
students who dedicated themselves to winning freedom for the
condemned man, Gauger's spare, 8-foot-by-10-foot prison cell
became an extra classroom, filled with lessons in the fallibility of
America's criminal justice system - particularly the death penalty.

Gauger, his fingers once again stained with the soil of rural
Illinois, was one of 31 exonerated death row inmates, including two
women, who journeyed to Chicago last fall for a slow and chilling
parade across the stage of Thorne Auditorium at Northwestern's
landmark National Conference on Wrongful Convictions and the
Death Penalty. But it was those who were absent from the
conference - those who have been wrongly executed and those
convicted in error who are sitting on death row - who serve as the
most urgent reminder that Marshall's work and that of a nationwide
network dedicated to freeing the innocent is only beginning.

Leading the push is Northwestern, a pioneer in the effort to
right wrongful convictions nationwide. The numbers suggest there
are more Gary Gaugers. Since capital punishment was reinstated in
the United States in 1976, 74 people on death row have been freed on
the basis of DNA samples, the emergence of other new evidence or
confessions from the real killers. For every seven executions - there
have been about 500 - one prisoner has been found innocent.

"What we are seeing is a great American tragedy," says Bryan
Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative of
Alabama and the keynote speaker at the fall conference, which drew
more than 1,500 people. With all of our resources and law
professionals, we almost executed 74 innocent people."

Marshall hopes the highly publicized conference will serve as a
catalyst for a new movement. He envisions having at least one
professor at each law school in the country dedicated to working on
wrongful conviction cases. This person also would develop a
curriculum for teaching students about miscarriages of justice that
arise from a system that is under intense pressure to solve crimes
quickly.

"I would like to see every law school in the country linked
together on this issue," says Barry Scheck, professor and co-director
of the Innocence Project at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N.
Cardozo School of Law in New York City." The National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers already voted to help find
lawyers for the project - pretty good lawyers, too."

Marshall tries to help his students and others understand how
the justice system can fail so miserably. "The power we have as
lawyers is to effect change," he says. "It's so critical to attack the vice
of complacency. Law schools fail when they train the mind but ignore
the soul."

At Northwestern, students at the Legal Clinic play a crucial
role in cases for select clients unable to pay legal fees. Students work
with the clients, do the legal research and conduct the factual
investigation. Usually between two and four students are assigned
to any one case." Students live and breathe that case during the time
they are in the Legal Clinic, just
as good lawyers do in representing their clients," Marshall explains.

Big budgets and perfect plans aren't necessary to start an
innocence project, according to Jacqueline McMurtrie, director of the
Criminal Law Center at the University of Washington School of
Law. Rather, what is needed is a core group of volunteers. "You are
sitting on a mother lode of volunteers in a law school," she says.
"Students are eager for real-life experience."

Students in the Medill School of Journalism have worked in
conjunction with Legal Clinic students on several cases. Already, the
investigative journalism course taught by professor David Protess
plugs students directly into cases where they can unearth wrongful
convictions, often in situations where lawyers have given up.

One of the most highly publicized examples is the Ford Heights
Four case, in which four unjustly convicted men spent almost two
decades on death row for a double murder. Protess' journalism
students and Marshall's law students both played a role in the
exoneration of the men. Protess documented the case in a recently
published book, A Promise of Justice, with co-author Rob Warden,
founder and editor of Chicago Lawyer, a newspaper aimed at the
area's legal community.

"The biggest eye-opener for students is the extent to which
people can get railroaded," Protess says. "One man out of seven
(sent to death row) is proven innocent. I believe there are more."

Protess, inundated with mail from prisoners, is grateful for his
students: "I wouldn't be able to do what I do without [them]."

His investigative journalism class - which has a limit of 16
students - breaks into groups of four to work primarily on Illinois
cases that he believes are worth investigating. In the fall of 1998,
Protess offered a special topics course that dealt only with capital
cases and was tied directly to November's conference.

With the publication of A Promise of Justice and the publicity
surrounding other high-profile cases, classes offered by Protess
always fill up early.

The downside is that students come to his investigative
journalism classes thinking they can right any wrong, and it doesn't
always work that way. "I let them know that the goal here is to find
the truth. Some students find someone who was guilty. They have to
realize that's OK, too. The ultimate goal is the truth."

Crystal Yednak (J95), a former Protess student, says she
learned that "you can't always accept what someone tells you as
fact, even if they are the cops or the prosecutors."

Now a reporter at Chicago's Daily Southtown, Yednak
attended the conference and says it was a good reminder of what she
had learned at the University.

"It's a real-world learning experience," she says. "No one
wants to give you information when you're reporting. It's all
confrontational, but when you are working to save someone's life, it
takes on a new significance."

Lara Flint (J95), who recently graduated from Harvard Law
School and is now clerking for a federal judge, was one of 10
journalism students assigned to the case of Girvies Davis, convicted
of killing an 89-year-old man in Chicago. No physical evidence
linked him to the crime, and it appeared police forced a confession
from Davis, who could neither read nor write.

Despite the efforts of Protess, his band of students and others
working on overturning Davis' conviction, the inmate was executed
in 1995. Protess calls
it a classic example of poor man's justice. The case also taught
students a valuable lesson. "So many journalism schools spend so
much time teaching you how to write," Flint says. "They don't spend
the time you need to learn how to report, to go out and get the
information you need."

As disappointing as the outcome of the Davis case was to the
students who worked on it, the victory was just as sweet this
February, when Protess, five
of his current students and a private investigator
played crucial roles in overturning the conviction of Anthony Porter.
The South Side Chicagoan had been fingered in the 1982 murder of
two teens, but after the group tracked down a Milwaukee man
whom they believed to be the perpetrator, their suspect confessed.

Adding to the drama of the situation, Porter came within 48
hours of being executed in September. At
that time, his sentence was stayed based on doubts about whether he
was mentally fit to be put to death. Marshall and a group of law
students were part of the team that worked with Porter's lawyer in
convincing the courts to grant that stay of execution.

Marshall would like to see a project led by
Northwestern that would advocate for journalists to have better
access to inmates. "Prisons tend to hide their inmates from the press," he says. "The public then has no access
to inmates, and it's easier to de-humanize them."

But introducing reforms within the conviction
and sentencing process, as well as pushing for a mora-
torium on the death penalty, are two more immediate goals. If
November's conference is any indicator, both initiatives are gaining
momentum in Illinois, across the country and in other parts of the
world.

Until last fall, however, the movement had churned on quietly.
The event brought to light the enthusiasm and hard work that had
won the 74 men and women their freedom.

Along with the exonerated, conference participants included
members of the Illinois Moratorium Movement and Murder Victims'
Families for Reconciliation. Wives and mothers of people on death
row came in search of support and solace. An Arizona woman, her
24-year-old nephew on death row in Ohio for a murder she is
convinced he didn't commit, spent much of her Social Security check
to fly to Chicago for the gathering.

Academics, social workers, attorneys, religious leaders,
students and journalists participated in sessions on flawed forensics,
jailhouse snitches, forced confessions and scores of other topics.
Speakers included Scheck, renowned death penalty attorney
Stephen Bright, U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) and human-rights
activists such as former boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, chair of the
Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted, and Piers
Bannister, head researcher on the death penalty for Amnesty
International
in London.

As each freed death row inmate filed across the stage and sat
down to face the audience during the culminating plenary session, he
or she placed a sunflower into a vase, symbolizing each life spared.
"I don't
see how you could look at these flowers that were almost
extinguished," Marshall told the tearful crowd, "and tell me the
death penalty works."

Many of the former death row inmates had lost more than
their freedom. Some had lost families,
others livelihoods and dreams. "To be told afterwards that the
system works," Stevenson said at the conference, "is cruel."

Randall Dale Adams was 72 hours away from execution when
evidence was brought to light that he had been framed for the killing
of a Dallas police officer. Kirk Bloodsworth spent nine years on
death row in Maryland for the rape and murder of a girl because he
resembled composite sketches made from some witness accounts.
DNA analysis proved he was not guilty.

In suburban Chicago, based partly on the testimony of
jailhouse informants, Rolando Cruz was sentenced to death for the
kidnapping, rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl. Cruz spent 12
years in prison (10 on death row), which gave the real murderer the
chance to kill another little girl. Cruz was finally set free after the
man, a repeat sex offender and murderer, confessed to the crime and
DNA confirmed his guilt.
"DNA is kind of a magic bullet," Scheck says. "It is telling us
something pretty profound about wrongful convictions."

Landmark improvements in DNA testing have resulted in
many releases. In the United States, 56 individuals have been freed
from prison as a result of DNA samples, although Scheck estimates
that 70 percent of the evidence that would provide DNA-based
exoneration is accidentally or intentionally lost or destroyed.

Marshall and the Legal Clinic played a significant role in
freeing Gauger and Cruz. "If it wasn't for Larry Marshall and the
Northwestern students volunteering on this case, I could still be in
prison or even dead," Gauger says.

Marshall handled Gauger's appeal after the inmate's twin
sister, Ginger, wrote the law professor a letter pleading for help.
Gauger himself had written many letters to people proclaiming his
innocence but had lost hope. "I felt like I was just sending out the
word 'Help!' in a bottle," he says.

Marshall and his team proved Gauger was coerced into a
confession by the police after 18 hours of unconstitutional
interrogation. Police falsely told Gauger that they had evidence
proving his guilt and convinced him he must have blacked out and
murdered his parents. "That was the worst part of it all," he says,
"thinking that I could have killed my mother and father."

Gauger's death sentence was reduced to life in prison in 1994
because of lack of evidence; two years later, he was freed when the
court threw out his statement. One year after that, FBI agents
overheard two motorcycle gang members on a wiretap bragging
about committing the murder, and a federal grand jury charged the
bikers with the crime.

Returning to normality has been a challenge, Gauger says,
although the conference provided some catharsis. Not only did
Gauger get a chance to connect with others who have experienced
the frustration and terror of a wrongful death row sentence, he
began to feel emotions again.

"I feel like I was abducted from my home, held against my will
and essentially robbed of years of my life and my ability to trust," he
says. "There are a lot of people like me."

Northwestern invited all 74 exonerated men and women to
attend the conference, but some declined, saying they couldn't face
reliving their horror. "The pain was too intense," Marshall says.
Others are still having a hard time adjusting, some are incarcerated
on other charges and a few have taken their own lives since their
release from prison for wrongful conviction.

Marshall would like to see measures put in place to make
capital convictions less error-prone and arbitrary - including better
training of law enforcement officials and prosecutors.

"A trial is supposed to be the absolute search for truth," he says.
"Make it more balanced. Oftentimes, the playing field isn't level.
[Defense attorneys] are overworked and often inexperienced.
"My dream is that once Americans are exposed to the reality of
wrongful convictions, they will move toward a moratorium of the
death penalty. I realize abolition is unrealistic in the short term,"
Marshall says. "It's vital for the whole country to understand that
what we're talking about is not some abstract ideal. It is as real as
anything can be. Ask the men and women who have been through
this hell."

Laurie Aucoin is a reporter for the Daily Herald (Arlington Heights,
Ill.) and a freelance writer.

"THE POWER WE HAVE AS LAWYERS IS TO EFFECT CHANGE. IT'S SO CRITICAL TO ATTACK THE VICE OF COMPLACENCY. LAW SCHOOLS FAIL WHEN THEY TRAIN THE MIND BUT INGNORE THE SOUL."